JONATHAN
CHARTERIS-BLACK
'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' - PROVERBS
ABOUT SPEECH AND SILENCE: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC
PERSPECTIVE
'Still waters run deep', 'Speech is
silver, silence is golden', 'Empty vessels make the most
sound', these proverbs could be included in what Permiakov
has referred to as a "paremiological minimum" of English
proverbs, i.e. a central stock of proverbs necessary for
cultural literacy (Permiakov,
1971, 1973, & 1989). This
paper proposes that such proverbs about speech and silence
comprise a proverb type. There have been various attempts to
establish a system for the cross-linguistic comparison of
proverbs, originally Taylor
(1931) proposed the
possibility of a proverb type which underlay a range of
possible variants in different languages. M.
Kuusi (1972) developed the
notion of a proverb typology, and described proverbs from
different languages which shared the same idea and were
expressed in the same or a similar image as being variants
of the same proverb type. The type is, therefore, a
universal notion of which language-specific forms are
considered to be variants. For example, in the case of
speech proverbs, "Still waters run deep" also occurs in
Russian along with an alternative: "There may be deep
bottoms in still water"; it will be proposed that variants
such as these are of the same type.
One of the difficulties with
paremiological approaches which perceive the proverb as a
self-contained proposition is that they provide no
explanation of the widespread phenomenon of pairs of
proverbs with apparently opposite meanings. For example, in
contrast to those proverbs given above, we also find in
Russian "Still waters undermine the bank" or "There may be
the devil in still water". Semantic contradiction in proverb
systems can only be accounted for in terms of the speakers'
communicative intentions within a given context, this is
because speakers' selections of fixed expressions will
depend on their intentions which, in turn, vary according to
the context of utterance. The questions which this paper
aims to answer are: in general terms, what can we learn
about human communication from a study of proverbs?
Secondly, can communicative intention provide an effective
basis for the classification of proverbs referring to speech
and silence? Thirdly, do they constitute a source of
ethnographic data? A total of 123 proverbs which are
translated into English from 41 different languages will
provide data to support the answers which are proposed to
these questions.
Since we are attempting to explore the
topic of proverbs which relate to speech and silence from a
cross-linguistic perspective it is important to consider the
function and purpose of proverbs and how they exhibit more
general, and possibly universal, intentions in human
communication. Proverbs provide excellent data for
illustrating what Grice
(1975) has described as the
Co-operative principle: "Make your contribution such as is
required at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted
purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you
engage".
Proverbs adhere to the four maxims of
the Co-Operative Principles: Quantity, Quality, Manner and
Relation. In terms of Quantity, they are brief but
informative. In terms of Quality, they reflect what the
speaker perceives to be true and for which they have
evidence in the form of the conventional wisdom which they
represent; although, it is claimed, the truth value of a
proposition expressed in a proverb depends on the speaker's
topic and purpose rather than on its inherent truth. For
this reason, it is necessary to refer to the context of
their utterance to guage adherence to the maxim of Quality.
Thirdly, in terms of Manner, they are brief and orderly and
in terms of Relation, the frequent use of analogy and
metaphor often makes their relation with preceding discourse
somewhat obscure; in such cases the hearer resorts to
conversational implicature. When interpetation is
problematic, for example when the hearer is a foreigner, the
speaker may find it appropriate to offer an explanation of
the proverb's relevance to the topic of conversation. As Arora
(1995) has pointed
out:
The listener's identification
of a proverb is a two-fold process involving first the
abstract notion of "proverb" as it is culturally or
ethnically conceived, and secondly a means of assigning
individual utterances to that genre.
The full text of this
article is published in De
Proverbio - Issue
2:1995, an
electronic book, available from amazon.com and other leading Internet booksellers.
The last category of proverbs are
those which compare speech with action. The communicative
intention in such proverbs is to present speech as an
alternative to action.
Table E: Proverbs which
compare action positively with speech
Actions speak louder than
words. (English)
Talking is easy, action is difficult. (Spanish)
Slow in word, swift in deed. (Chinese)
Word a mout' no load 'pon head. (Jamaica)
Talk is cheap but it takes money to buy whisky.
(American)
Your militia are great talkers and little doers.
(American)
Many words will not fill a bushel. (American)
An oven whose door does not shut does not bake its
loaves. (Maltese)
Many words do not fill a basket. (Yoruba)
A talkative bird will not build a nest. (West
African)
Empty words do not fill one's stomach. (Turkish)
The cheese vessel will not sail merely by words.
(Turkish)
We can see in these proverbs a view on
life which can be summarised by the concept of the work
ethic; that is that those who talk are an impediment to the
achievement of material goals. There is also the same
perception of talk as implied by the folk saying: "Sticks
and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me";
it is ultimately action rather than talking which changes
the world. It is worth noticing that when action is compared
with speaking, it is in fact a certain type of speaking
which is negatively evaluated i.e. talking. To talk to
someone implies something more casual and of less import
than speaking to them; this sense carries over into the noun
forms: a speech is certainly a more formal event than a
talk.
The category of proverbs which
positively evaluate action as compared with speech (or
talking) includes proverbs from nine different
languages.
Having explored some of the universal
and cross-linguistic features of proverbs which taken
together comprise the type 'speech proverb', and
demonstrated how communicative intention can be used as a
basis for their classification, it remains to consider the
last of the research questions regarding proverbs as a
source of insight into ethnographic attitudes and
culture-specific perspectives on speech. There are a number
of difficulties here, not the least of which is the absence
of information on the relative frequency with which each of
the proverbs in the above tables are used in each of the
cultures concerned. Much research is done in this field
which relies exclusively on published collections of
proverbs as isolated sentences. Claims for proverbs as a
source of information on ethnogaphic perspectives requires
some indication of the relative frequency of occurence of
these speech events. However, we can first identify the
frequency with which proverbs from certain languages appear
in the above tables:
Japanese |
11 |
proverbs |
Turkish |
11 |
proverbs |
Yoruba |
9 |
proverbs |
American |
8 |
proverbs |
Hindustani |
9 |
proverbs |
English |
5 |
proverbs |
Malay |
4 |
proverbs |
Chinese |
4 |
proverbs |
Arabic |
4 |
proverbs |
Korean |
4 |
proverbs |
Russian |
4 |
proverbs |
Thai |
3 |
proverbs |
Maltese |
3 |
proverbs |
While the study of proverbs relating
to a single topic may not be representative of the full
range of proverbs, we can agree with Fischer & Yoshida
(1968), McNeil (1971) and de Caro (1987) that proverbs are
of some importance as a source of insight into the cultural
norms and beliefs of the speakers of these languages. We can
see, for example, that in Japan, the proverb is an effective
means of recommending silence as playing a culturally
acceptable role in communication. Fischer and Yoshida
related this to demographic factors proposing the hypothesis
that Japan's population density lead to forms of control
over all forms of potentially aggressive behaviour. From a
sociolinguistic perspective we can observe that the
traditional nature of Japanese society is reflected
linguistically in the complexity of address terms, honorific
suffixation, register and lexical choice in Japanese. The
cumulative effect of social constraints within a
hierarchical society is that it is not possible to
communicate without providing explicit evidence of one's
perception of the relative status of speaker and hearer.
This makes silence a preferred and sociolinguistically
acceptable option. The use of the proverbs is further
encouraged by the absence of status free
pronouns:
References to the second and
third person in Japanese are inevitably bound up with
concepts of social status. (Martin
1988:1079)
The full text of this
article is published in De
Proverbio - Issue
2:1995, an
electronic book, available from amazon.com and other leading Internet booksellers.
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Jonathan Charteris-Black
English Language Institute
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey GU2 5XH
United Kingdom
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